Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (21 page)

Figure 6. Fiber in 4 Slices of Bread and Other Foods

Dangerous Change No. 6: Too Much Alcohol

Ever since Prohibition, Americans have been drinking more alcohol. They drank the equivalent of 2.69 gallons of
pure
alcohol per person in 1975, 24 percent more than during the 1961–65 period. Of course, this figure is misleading, because while many people drink little or no alcohol, others drink far more than their share.
³⁹
The biggest increases have come in wine, with 490 million gallons sold in 1979, and beer, up from 82 million barrels in 1950 to 175 million barrels in 1979.
⁴⁰
(Some 25 percent of the cereal grains directly consumed in the United States are used to make alcoholic beverages.
⁴¹
)

Alcoholic beverages offer us few nutrients but lots of calories—210 calories per day in the average adult diet in 1975. (Again, this is misleading: since many Americans drink no alcohol, others must get 500 or even 1,000 calories a day from alcoholic drinks.
⁴²
)

T
HE
R
ISKS

Alcohol leads to cirrhosis of the liver, the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. It can also cause birth defects and mouth cancer. Even more deadly is alcohol’s effect in traffic accidents: half of all traffic deaths involve a drinking driver. Moreover, alcoholism destroys—only more slowly—the lives of millions of Americans every year.

Despite these undisputed dangers, sales of alcoholic beverages amount to more than $45 billion a year. Anheuser Busch, which controls 26 percent of the beer market, spends $120 million a year on advertising, and the alcohol industries have enormous political power.
⁴³

Dangerous Change No. 7: More Additives, Antibiotic Residues, and Pesticides

F
OOD
A
DDITIVES

“It is impossible to know exactly how many pounds of artificial colors, flavors and preservatives we ingest annually” is the sober assessment of Letitia Brewster and Michael Jacobson. In
The Changing American Diet
, these authors note that the only accurate records made public are the amounts of coal-tar-based colors certified each year by the Food and Drug Administration. But Brewster and Jacobson suggest that the increase in the use of food coloring is probably a pretty good indicator of the increase in other additives. The use of certified food coloring has increased about
elevenfold
since 1940.
⁴⁴

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The debate over the risks of food additives continues. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, co-founded by Jacobson, has spent ten years looking into these risks. Jacobson’s first book,
Eater’s Digest
(Doubleday, 1972), is a valuable encyclopedia of food additives and their risks.

“But there are hundreds of common additives,” I said to Michael Jacobson in a recent phone conversation. “What do
you
tell people to do?” He answered with a list of five additives about which he believes there is enough evidence to warrant concern.

Read labels and avoid these additives, Michael suggests. “But it’s not so difficult,” he says. “Basically, if you avoid junk food, you’ll avoid most of them.”

A
NTIBIOTICS

Livestock consume nearly half of the 25 million pounds of antibiotics produced in this country every year, an output that has shot up 400 percent in the last 20 years. Livestock eat most of these antibiotics in their feed, which contains low-level doses to enhance growth and prevent disease. Penicillin and tetracycline are the most common.
⁴⁵

Cancer-causing sulfa residues from antibiotics are still occasionally found in pork above the levels now considered safe, according to my former husband, pathologist Marc Lappé, author of
Germs That Will Not Die: The New Threat of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria
(Doubleday/Anchor Press, 1981). In addition, the carcinogenic growth hormone DES has been discovered in some cattle, even after its banning several years ago.

Marc and other scientists fear that such widespread use of antibiotics in animals could lead to the evolution of bacteria resistant to common antibiotics. “The drugs are used in livestock production in total disregard of the possibility that they could create resisistant bacteria which might directly or indirectly cause disease in humans, or even human epidemics,” Marc warns.

The Food and Drug Administration is now considering banning the use of penicillin and certain types of tetracycline in animal feed.

The antibiotic explosion is just one more aspect of the destructive production imperative. Since poultry producers can get as much as 12 percent more weight gain from the same amount of feed when antibiotics are used, they feel they have no economic choice. Antibiotics also reduce disease and death, problems greatly exacerbated by the large-scale, high-density livestock production our economy encourages.

P
ESTICIDES

Pesticide use
doubled
from 1966 to 1976, reaching about 600 million pounds of active ingredients. When livestock eat tremendous volumes of treated grass and grain, pesticide residues concentrate in their tissues. Not surprisingly, a Food and Drug Administration study of our diet found the most (22 percent) pesticide detections in meat, fish, and poultry. (Virtually all the detections of DDT were in this group.) Oils and fats were next, with 18 percent of all detections.
⁴⁶

Studies of human breast milk offer strong evidence linking animal fat in the diet with heightened concentrations of pesticides. Stephanie Harris, formerly with the Environmental Defense Fund, told me that her study, using matched controls, found a significant correlation between pesticide levels in breast milk and the diet of the mother. “The more animal fats in the diet, the more pesticides we found in the mother’s milk,” Stephanie told me. “To reduce our intake of pesticides,” she suggests, “means not only cutting back on our meat intake but also on full-fat dairy foods—butter, whole milk and fatty cheeses.”
⁴⁷

Our national intake of DDT is going down. But you might be surprised that there is any DDT in our food at all, since it was banned for use here in 1972. Unfortunately, the life span of organochlorine pesticides already introduced into the environment ranges from 7 years to over 40 years. And while the amount of DDT in our food may be going down, our intake of other pesticides, like malathion, toxaphene, and captan, is going up.
⁴⁸

T
HE
R
ISKS

No one knows. Our intake of pesticides does not exceed what the government calls safe “tolerance” levels. But these toxicity standards are established on the basis of short-term toxicity tests on small animals. They tell us little about the long-term risks to humans.

Moreover, when officials of the Environmental Protection Agency checked up on Industrial Biotest Laboratories, the mammoth lab which conducted most of the studies establishing the “safe” levels for pesticides consumed by Americans, it found that more than 75 percent of the tests audited were invalid. They involved faulty test procedures or downright falsification of data.
⁴⁹

We may not know for 10 to 20 years (or we may never know) the true health risks of pesticides in our food. In the meantime, one way to reduce our exposure is to limit our intake of meat, poultry, fish, and fats. Fruits and vegetables come next in line as carriers of pesticides. Chemists recommend that we wash commercially produced fruits and vegetables with detergent to reduce the amount of pesticides we eat.

In 1981 our Institute published
Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World
, a book by David Weir and Mark Schapiro. It reveals that American chemical corporations are legally exporting to the third world pesticides that have been banned or heavily restricted in the U.S. Residues of these banned pesticides have been found in some of the food we import. Therefore, avoiding imported meat, fruits, and vegetables makes sense as another way to lower your pesticide intake.

Dangerous Change No. 8: Too Many Calories

I probably don’t have to present evidence to convince you of one of the key consequences of the new American diet. A government study confirms what our scales are telling us: as of the early 1970s the average American man was six pounds heavier and the average woman seven pounds heavier than their counterparts of 15 years earlier.
⁵⁰
Twenty percent of all Americans are either clinically overweight or obese.
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ISKS

Extra pounds can aggravate hypertension and heart disease.
⁵²
(Even a 10 percent reduction in weight can lower blood pressure significantly, according to a recent study.
⁵³
) It is less widely known that obesity is also believed to promote diabetes.

But why are Americans getting fatter?

We are not eating more calories, but we are burning up less because our lives are more sedentary. Moreover, with the typical American high-fat, low-fiber, high-sugar diet you can eat a lot of calories without eating very much bulk, so you just don’t feel full. A gram of fat has more than twice as many calories as a gram of carbohydrate. This means that for the calorie “cost” of just one pat of butter or two bites of hamburger, you could eat a whole cup of plain popcorn, a slice of bread, most of a small potato, a cup of strawberries, or an entire head of lettuce.

Eating more plant food and less animal food allowed me not only to shed my extra ten pounds (never achieved as a chronic dieter) but to maintain the same weight for the last ten years. And my experience is apparently not exceptional. Says the
Journal of the American Dietetic Association:
“Persons who were previously omnivores and became vegetarians in adulthood report weight loss rather than gain.”
⁵⁴
It suggests that increased physical activity might also play a part, as was true for me. Most important, I was liberated from the stifling preoccupation with weight that plagues so many Americans.

The Good News

The flip side of the message in this chapter—that so many of our most dreaded diseases are related to the food we now eat—is the good news: we can reduce our chances of getting these diseases since
we
control what we eat. And it’s easy. We don’t have to memorize a book of tables and walk through the grocery store with an electronic calculator, adding up grams of fat, salt, and sugar. Since the eight threats to our health derive mainly from animal foods and processed foods, achieving a healthy diet involves only a few steps: reducing our consumption of animal foods (limiting eggs to three a week and cutting back on full-fat dairy products), enjoying a variety of
whole
foods, and using safflower, sunflower, corn, or soybean oil at home. Remember, what the medical authorities are recommending today is not some newfangled way of eating that requires a Ph.D. to put together. It is a pattern of eating that sustained human life for thousands of years.